"Initiation" In Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf’s first novel, begins in early 1908 and not gets published until 1915, taking almost nine years to write and rewrite. The book mainly concerns the initiation voyage of a young female named Rachel Vinrace, twenty-four years old, but emphatically naive. Rachel’s initiation, taking her not to marriage or motherhood but to death, not only reflects Woolf’s desire to complete female initiation, but also her attempt to break with the imposed initiation paradigm and to create a different one. Rachel’s initiation voyage comes very close to Woolf’s own initiation voyage to gain her authority in artistic creation, both formally and thematically.The thesis is conducted in three parts. Firstly, it explores different connotations of the term "initiation" and Woolf s understanding of "initiation" in the novel. Initiation story is to depict an initiate’s change of knowledge about the external world or his inner world through experiencing, which leaves permanent effects on the initiate. Male and female initiations are two greatly different processes that prepare for the roles accorded to males and females in culture. Female initiation paradigm encourages young woman to be "angel in the house" and to be subordinate to man without her own voices or ideas. Initiation exists universally as a symbolic death and rebirth in the history of religions and confrontation with death symbolizes the passage from innocence to maturity. Only by "dying" to the previous condition can the passage from innocence to spiritual being take place since death is an expression of the termination of a mode of being. Woolf in The Voyage Out challenges the old female initiation and attempts to create a new story of female initiation. The image of moth in Woolf’s works is identified as her artistic self. The transformation of the moth is taken by Woolf as her painful creative process which gives birth to a new artistic self after great perils.Secondly, the thesis deals with Woolf’s great capacity as an innovator who initiates a new writing form, manifesting in the following three aspects. First, Woolf s characterization breaks up with traditional characterization and her characterization of Rachel is shapeless, elusive, and hard to be given a constant definition in order to achieve its completeness and complexity. Second, Woolf focuses on the inner world of the characters whose important moments of consciousness shape the mental development. Third, Woolf believes images suggest the flow of the mental process with its accompanying charge of emotion. The use of symbolic images throughout The Voyage Out enables to convey deep emotional state of Rachel Vinrace.Thirdly, it explores initiation in thematic depth and its relation to Woolf’s initiation. Rachel’s voyage comes very close to that of Woolf herself. Rachel’s journey is a representation of Woolf’s life experience from 1907 to 1915. And Rachel’s horrible nightmare reflects Woolf’s mental illness she suffers during her composition of the novel. Based on the analysis of Woolf’s life and her artistic creation as well as her understanding of initiatory death, Rachel’s death is not to be seen as a real death in the body but an initiatory death, precedes a rebirth of new self. In other words, Woolf embraces a rebirth of new self with more powerful creative imagination through the great perils Woolf experienced in writing The Voyage Out, in her great battle with the literary conventions and determined paradigm of female initiation.